Private Equity’s Defenders Emerge From Shadows

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg NewsHamilton E. James, the Blackstone Group president, said that by providing needed capital, the private equity industry was a vital part of the economy.

As the political attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital have intensified, many have wondered when the private equity industry would try to mount a full defense of its practices. Now, after months of quiet complaining, some buyout defenders are punching back.

Hamilton E. James, the president of the Blackstone Group and one of the highest-ranking titans of the private equity industry, spoke in full-throated support of the business on Thursday, the same day Blackstone reported its fourth-quarter earnings.

“Six months ago,” Mr. James said on a conference call with reporters, “I worried aloud about political attacks on private equity if Mitt Romney ran for president. Well, that has certainly come to pass.”

Mr. James, who is second in command at Blackstone to Stephen A. Schwarzman, the firm’s co-founder, said that while private equity deal-making was no longer all Blackstone did, it was worth defending from critics who used it as a political kickball.

“It is distressing to all of us here who strive every day to do the best we can for both our investors and for the economy over all, to witness the vicious, politically motivated attacks on the P.E. business that are inaccurate and unfair,” Mr. James said. “We provide critical capital for start-ups, growing companies and struggling business on a scale and in times of turmoil that cannot be replicated elsewhere.”

Mr. James’s comments came on the same day that the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, the buyout industry’s lobbying group, started a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to rebut attacks on the industry. The campaign, called “Private Equity at Work,” included a Web site with private equity success stories, a “fact vs. fiction” section and photographs of smiling construction workers, doctors and construction managers — the types of people, the images implied, that have been helped by private equity investments. Blackstone is among the lobbying group’s member firms.

“There is a real lack of understanding about private equity — what it does, how it works and who benefits from it,” Steve Judge, the group’s chief executive, said in a statement announcing the image campaign. “We wanted to set the record straight.”

As part of its strategy, the group has been distributing articles and opinion columns written in defense of private equity. On Thursday, the group e-mailed a column written in The Wall Street Journal by Armand F. Lauzon Jr., a chief executive who has led several companies owned by the Carlyle Group, another private equity megafund and one of Blackstone’s main rivals. In the article, Mr. Lauzon wrote that “private equity firms are not perfect, but they can be lifelines when the future of a company is in question and jobs are at stake.”

Private equity has been characterized by some of Mr. Romney’s opponents, Republicans and Democrats alike, as a job-killing financial practice that strips businesses for parts and reaps profits even when companies go bankrupt. Rivals have scoured over the many deals Mr. Romney led while atop Bain Capital, singling out companies that went bankrupt or laid off workers after they were acquired.

For Mr. James, a big Democratic donor who has contributed to President Obama’s re-election campaign, defending private equity is more personal than political. He said on Thursday that when Blackstone earns returns, that money goes “predominantly to pension plans and charitable organizations” that are the firm’s limited partners. Those pension funds have struggled to grow amid a volatile investing climate, and many have turned to private equity as a way to bolster returns.

“If they can’t earn back this deficit, retirement benefits will be in jeopardy,” he said.

Mr. James acknowledged that in the course of thousands of deals, “there will inevitably be a few that don’t work out, with negative consequences for us, our investors and the communities in which we work.”

But he said that those failures were exceptions that “provide anecdotal fodder for political attack ads.” He countered that line of thinking with the example of PBF Energy, an oil refinery business that Blackstone and another firm, First Reserve, acquired in 2010. The refinery, which filed to go public last year, has rehired 500 union workers and 400 contract workers since it reopened last fall, Mr. James said.

“Taken as a whole,” Mr. James said, private equity “is not only an important contributor to a healthy economy, it is a vital one.”